I think this expansion has been great for balancing specs of most classes. And as long as your not someone in one of the top 10 world guilds, who does everything exactly perfect, never screws up and is itemized exactly perfectly, then it doesn't matter what spec you play as you can pull solid numbers in any spec. I've realized that quite a bit when it comes to choosing races. I was so frustrated that Troll/Orcs get such a good bonus that I couldn't play something other than a troll or Orc, then I realized, that TBH that small tiny little bit, is not going to make that big of a difference unless your a top 5% player. Play what you want, the specs are balanced quite well. You will be happier, and probably play the class better, thus making your dps numbers higher.

the amount of misinformation in this thread is hilarious. why not just check the dps rankings on WOL?

if you drill down and compare all 3 lock specs on each fight, you'll see that aff & demo are tied at the top for most fights while destro is only really competitive for 2-3 fights. if you're topping your raid's charts as destro, grats on big fish small pond but you would be winning even more playing the better specs.

if you are a noob and you want to see what spec is best you dont want to look at dps rankings because they are biased towards players that are extreme experts in their spec not to mention tactics that they used that might not be indicative of the *general* performance of a spec.

eh... the thread is asking for rankings on the lock specs. who the hell is interested in ranking bad play versus other bad play? i'm going off the assumption that people on this forum are interested in playing as well as possible, and if the rankings say aff/demo is better than destro, those noob players are better off trying to learn aff/demo so they can get the biggest ROI. no?

Paragons is probably the new uber cheese fight in terms of number padding but I'd say demo is the functional top dps with aff close behind it. Simply due to demo having the mobility thus the basically zero loss for not taking KJC allowing for MF/AD at no penalty. Destro can kind of do okay on spoils or gala but its going to be quite a bit weaker everywhere else.

Maybe at sub 500ilvl or something destro is still good (TBH I haven't done much testing at that ilvl for 5.4 mechanics) but by the time you are up with the rest of the content at 550+ its fallen well behind.

Logs? WOL would indicate that aff is very strong right now. As aff right now I crush our destro locks dps, around 50% more dmg on most fights and that's without any useless aoe meter padding on any fight that destro relies heavily on for dps (most fights I tunnel bosses and don't touch adds that don't live long)

eh... the thread is asking for rankings on the lock specs. who the hell is interested in ranking bad play versus other bad play? i'm going off the assumption that people on this forum are interested in playing as well as possible, and if the rankings say aff/demo is better than destro, those noob players are better off trying to learn aff/demo so they can get the biggest ROI. no?

Do remember that there is a big chunk of sample bias as well. If most people hear that Aff beats Destro, most people are going to be trying out Aff instead of destro. This leads to the situation where the sheer number of actual parses of Affliction is so much higher than the number of Destro parses that there will be parses that are higher, simply due to the statistic of being part of a bigger sample pool. It may very well be that a spec is good, but you're not seeing the results cause the sheep flock has flocked to this patch's fotm spec.

Do remember that there is a big chunk of sample bias as well. If most people hear that Aff beats Destro, most people are going to be trying out Aff instead of destro. This leads to the situation where the sheer number of actual parses of Affliction is so much higher than the number of Destro parses that there will be parses that are higher, simply due to the statistic of being part of a bigger sample pool. It may very well be that a spec is good, but you're not seeing the results cause the sheep flock has flocked to this patch's fotm spec.

You can look at the 100 best samples of every spec, not the biggest sample size but you get your absolute top dpsers for every spec, with some mild or heavy cheesing on some fights. Still shows that destro lag behind on most fights with the new SS for affli and buffs to their dots. Should be noted that I play 25 man and that is how I look at it, destro is far better in 10 compared to 25.

I've run the first 8 bosses of siege as Demo and had alot of fun and pulled some big numbers. There is so much aoe involved in alot of the fights and using Manno's Fury with Immo Aura is proving to be pretty tasty.

Saying that, I've never really mastered affliction and looking at the buffs and current rankings on WoL, i'm keen to start playing Affliction.

You can look at the 100 best samples of every spec, not the biggest sample size but you get your absolute top dpsers for every spec, with some mild or heavy cheesing on some fights. Still shows that destro lag behind on most fights with the new SS for affli and buffs to their dots. Should be noted that I play 25 man and that is how I look at it, destro is far better in 10 compared to 25.

It's def competitive with other classes for sure.

Thing is, that the top players are those who are most likely to pick the 'best' spec.

I only killed a couple of bosses last night as I've been away for a week, I didn't have my cloak yet and I was pretty unprepared for what I did do, but I certainly didn't feel like I was underperforming relative to our other 3 locks in raid playing the other specs who did have it. I'd say I was competitive, in spite of playing like shit

I feel the same, I always at the middle of the charts on any spec, having no meta and cloak sucks everyone get so ahead on pulls haha

if you are a noob and you want to see what spec is best you dont want to look at dps rankings because they are biased towards players that are extreme experts in their spec not to mention tactics that they used that might not be indicative of the *general* performance of a spec.

The main problem with looking at dps-rankings to determine wich spec is the best is the fact, that the top rankings might be dominated by the spec that is able to pull the highest numbers when the rng-gods are in its favor. Might be, that the spec, that tops the rankings is actually one with a very high variance, so that over the course of severall pulls it might on average actually perform worse.
A better approach would be to take a reasonable sample of just good boss kills and look at the average dps the different specs manage to achieve there. That way you kind of average out variance (since a boss on normal mode will die regardles of rng-proccs).

A great affliction player will out shine an average destro player on a fight geared towards Destro.

Play the spec you're the most familiar with.

You can flip that the other way as well. I am willing to bet a lot of money that both zumzum and Brusalk will beat your average affliction warlock even on a fight catering to afflictions strengths. Your statement is really just saying that skill>Blizzard balancing which is true. Personally tried both affi and demo so far this tier and have done much better as demo (two #1 ranks and a #2 so far compared to top 100ish parses as affi).